May 30th, 2020
Something for Saturday
I had my zoom lens on so a lot of the pictures came out somewhat blurry, but I still managed to get some rather interesting close up shots from six feet away.
First up, a little bee and a dandy dandelion flower. We still do not have any dandelions or wild flowers yet at our place, but the dandy's are bursting fourth in lots of other places making the bees happy.
I did see and try to get a picture of one of the fat fuzzy bumble bees, unfortunately those ones did not come out focused well at all.
I was gonna save this one for Tuesday, but I am not very good at waiting sometimes, and I wanted to show some of the things I saw on this walking waiting wander.
The tree wound could have been caused by any number of things but I thought it looked pretty good with the sap and the lighting. The tree is not going to let a few bumps and scratches keep it from growing.
Like the wounded tree image above I thought for a few minutes about saving this one and doing a separate post for a flower photo contest I saw a few days ago, but then this post would have been one picture shorter, and my walk would have seen somewhat more boring.
After leaving that little area I started up a small Alaskan alley way and happened to see this small pine cone on the ground, I was not sure if I was back far enough and had enough of an angle to have it focused, but I think the camera focus was pretty good, just above the pine cone you can see the small rock that is not in focus. Close ups with a zoom lens are some times not an easy thing to do.
Now you are probably wondering what I found when I was wandering along this particular Alaskan Alley. This is known as a 'Willow Rose Gall', now I have seen the green rose galls from the bugs but I have never seen a dried black looking one and I had to do some searching on line to find what it was. Here is a link to all things Alaskan Willow wise. that is a Fish and Wild Life PDF file.
Now this one I was pleasantly surprised at when i off-loaded it from the camera. I like how only the wire is in focus, no background and even the post, (tall skinny tree trunk), are not in focus. I'm sure there could have been some special place to post this picture, but it does fit nicely with the others and was a part of my findings.
Okay so here is the Alaskan Alley trail, it is more of an alley by the business area, then turns to a four wheel drive trail and then likely to only a four wheeler trail further down, i did not walk that far to determine that but most four wheel drive trails do sort of peter out in an "okay end of trail lets unload the ATV's" trail.
Well that pretty much concludes that walk, either Sunday or Monday I'll show some of our second stop of the day pictures.
I was not sure which community I wanted to post this in, so since it covers a few different topics I thought I would support the GEMS community with this post.
Enjoy the weekend.
All images were taken by me with my Nikon camera on 5-29-2020
A lot of interesting things to photograph on your wandering. I never heard of the unusual 'Willow Rose Gall'.before. The stem looked green but the flower black.
It's not really a flower, it is caused by midges, like a midge nest, those tiny annoying little flying things that sometimes bite, or at least that was what I could find, most of the time the willow rose is green, but I guess this one survived the winter and was black.